Page 38 - To Dragma May 1930

M A Y , 1930 35

that I visited. But every one seemed kind, perhaps because it was all
rather pitiful—especially when they asked to see the magazine and made
inquiries over circulation.

"This was far more discouraging than non-subscribers, and it seemed
the only way to rival the Saturday Evening Post was to get more sub-
scribers. So we went off on another of our campaigns. We were con-
tinually going on these, at times we grew weary and wrote postcards.
But this ended abruptly—as it well should—for one was sent to an Al-
pha 0 very important in her community, and she wrote me a very clear
statement as to the use of postcards. 'Never for impassioned pleas,'
she said (I'll never forget it). She evidently lived in a boarding house
with inquisitive-minded readers, for she wrote that she suffered great
humiliation. I often wonder what was on that postcard!

"I do remember how fine the San Francisco alumnae were. They
suggested the law of alumnae chapter members becoming automatic sub-
scribers, and we even used to talk about life subscriptions.

"The magazine now is so fine, so very much like the exchanges we
received through courtesy, that would make us wonder if we would ever
grow up and look like them. But we do 'look like them' now, and we
are very proud of it."

Sincerely,

ISABELLE HENDERSON STEWART

DEAR EDITOR:

"If elevation to Sainthood were determined by virtue of patience
and long suffering, then every editor of To DRAGMA would be raised
to that high estate!—-But, unfortunately, we know that something more
difficult of attainment than the seven cardinal virtues is necessary for
veneration, beautification, and canonization! Two things, in point of
fact—continuous joy and innate simplicity!!

"And no editor of To DRAGMA can be continuously joyful. Nor can
she escape developing a complexity of nature with chapter editors
dilatory or unrhetorical, with desired contributors recalcitrant or disin-
terested, and with galleys of proof demanding the sacrifice of reading
much higher in atmosphere.

"Asked to sketch my four years with To DRAGMA, I begin to probe
jnto a singularly barren memory. Most of my editorship was endured
in the great and cold state of Montana where I lived from 1914 to 1917.
I recall, besides the irritating inclusion and exclusion of commas in
chapter letters and the hours spent in reading proof, not many things.
And those for some probably unaccountable reason seem forever asso-
ciated with the cold of that state of prairies and of mountains. I re-
member two weeks of February weather when the mercury did not rise
above twenty below, when news of people frozen to death was con-
stantly reaching our ears, when schools were closed and one stared
from windows out upon a prairie stricken with such frightful cold that
one's very helplessness bred philosophy within his mind. During that
fortnight I was reading proof galleys, and I remember how futile they